A few years ago, a neighboring farmer sold the wooded portion of his property to a guy from Altoona who had been hunting on it for years, and assiduously courting the farmer by dropping in whenever he could to lend a hand. Before the ink had dried on the deed, he called up his old hunting buddies to tell them he now owned the land — and he didn’t want them hunting on it any longer. Then he decided to hire a surveyor to see if he could enlarge his holdings.
That’s where these rocks come in. Thanks to our new neighbor’s territorial ambitions, about seven years ago we were forced to shell out over $10,000 to survey our entire property, in part to prove that the line was not, in fact, two hundred feet farther in our direction than the customary understanding had held.
I thought it would be fun to take a look under one of the stones on a corner of our newly surveyed property line. See the one in the middle, without the orange paint? At some point a few years ago, it had been flipped over by a passing black bear (bears are rather obsessive-compulsive about flipping rocks) and nudged back into place by the next human to happen along. What, besides the buried corner stake, lurked underneath?
A very small woodland cockroach…
and a pile of moldy rodent droppings. It seemed strangely appropriate.
Send your IRFD links to me, bontasaurus (at) yahoo(dot) com, for recirculation to all participants tonight and tomorrow. (If you missed the orignal post explaining the event, it’s here. See also Bev’s thoughts here.) In the meantime, you can upload your photos to the Flickr photo pool and check out the other early entries from Windywillow, Heraclitean Fire, Sheep Days, Earth, Wind & Water, Pocahontas County Fare, and chatoyance.
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Geez! $10,000 to set things straight with a new neighbor. That ain’t right. I’d say cockroach and mice turds are approaching appropriate for this fellow.
Well, the property is 648 acres, and it’s a long rectangle, so the perimeter is several miles in length. And a lot of research goes into something like that. But yeah, it’s a lot of money no matter how you cut it.
Agree with Brett. Very appropriate.
[...] Via Negativa « International Rock-Flipping Day: First rock [...]
[...] The last in a series. See also Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. And don’t forget the check out the other participants’ blog posts, linked to at the bottom of Part 2. [...]
[...] The past month at Via Negativa began with the International Rock-Flipping Day reports, which I managed to get four posts out of. I was surprised and gratified by the response to this impromptu event, which was sparked by a comment at a VN post in late August. I linked to all the other IRFD participants I could find at the end of my second post. I was also pleased to see some dissenting voices — bloggers who preferred to leave under-rock denizens undisturbed. [...]